Today, we are announcing the end of this project. As many of you probably noticed over the past several months, we no longer have enough free time to properly maintain Antergos. We came to this decision because we believe that continuing to neglect the project would be a huge disservice to the community. Taking this action now, while the project’s code still works, provides an opportunity for interested developers to take what they find useful and start their own projects.
We want to thank you for all of your support over the years. While working on this project, we’ve learned many invaluable skills that have vastly improved both our personal and professional lives. For that we will always be grateful.
-Dustin, Alex, & Gustau
The Antergos GNOME Desktop environment
Today, May 21st, it was exactly five years ago the Antergos founders and developers dropped this bombshell of an announcement on their community. Besides Antergos being the “easy Arch install” distro with their unique installer named Cnchi, its best feature was the community which the founders also expressed at the beginning of that announcement.
“What started as a summertime hobby seven years ago quickly grew into an awesome Linux distribution with an even more awesome community around it. Our goal was to make Arch Linux available to a wider audience of users by providing a streamlined, user friendly experience including a safe place for users to communicate, learn, and help one another.”
The neglect Dustin refers to was clearly visible in the last months of Antergos’ existence. Repo packages that were versions behind, the installer was even hacked for a short period but most of all, there was no sign of a response from any of the developers on the forum or other social media platforms but despite those signs, the announcement took the entire community by surprise. The team released a new ISO with a fixed installer three weeks before that announcement, hence the surprised reaction.
I was one of those community members who didn’t see this decision coming. Earlier that year I was promoted to moderator on the forum by one of the defining community members named… My apologies, I forgot his name… I know he is German and his name rhymes with mow… It will come to me later, I’m sure.
Anyway, back on topic, I was determined to contribute my part to the distro and now it was coming to an abrupt stop.
So, I had this “brilliant idea” but like most of the “brilliant ideas” I come up with, I didn’t think it through…
There I was, reading posts from the community saying they had no idea where to go from here. The gist of all of these posts was that the majority of the community was fine dealing with Arch the distro, but not the community.
Easy peasy, I thought, why not move the community to a new forum and continue the great work and feeling over there? Brilliant, right?!?
I posted this idea, thinking a more experienced and tech-savvy person would pick up this idea, I would jump on that train and Bob’s your uncle…
The reactions to that post were overwhelmingly and enthusiastically positive and people were asking me when the forum would be live and if I could use Discourse as the forum software instead of the one Antergos used.
Just as I wanted to set the record straight, what happened next made matters worse, two moderators PM’ed me. One was @fernandomaroto who offered his Antergos-based Portergos ISO to be the base of the new project and the other one was, …Joe that’s his name…, @joekamprad who wrote that he wanted in too and asked if it was alright with me if @manuel could join too. They also asked about the bandwidth and the size of my server space…
Who… What?!?.. Why… How did this happen?!? Another idea of mine that went in the opposite direction than I envisioned myself…Me and my big mouth, think before you write things like that, Bryan!!!
Server space, what’s a Discourse, no, no, no…This can’t happen, I decided for myself. I’m going to thank these guys for the offer and I am going to answer that I am looking forward to seeing when their idea turns into reality and then I am going to join them as a community member.
Then, I am going to write a post on the forum with a good apology to the community and that is it.
There’s no chance in this lifetime I would be involved with a project like that, it’s ludicrous, where do I find the time and seriously, in my world Python is a snake, C is the third letter of the alphabet and Calamares is my favourite dish… well differently spelt then.
So, I started to write my reply to @fernandomaroto and @joekamprad…
Stop scaring us like that! It’s not even April Fools’ Day 